Maintaining Speedplay Pedals.

There is quite a lot of copy on the interwebs about the amount of effort it takes to maintain Speedplay pedals. Well given the fact that every trip to and from work this week has been over some pretty horrible roads, and each night I am washing the bike and lubing the chain, I thought I would look at giving the pedals a grease. Armed with my 40 cent grease gun, off I went. Here is a video of how the pedal spun before and after a new greasing.

The first pedal hadn’t been greased. It doesn’t spin very much at all, but compared to the second pedal, it was quite free.

So, how hard is it? Consider this, it took me longer to get the grease into the syringe than it did to put it into the pedals. It is certainly a bit harder to do with a syringe than a proper grease gun. Remove the small phillips head screw to open the injection port. You have to make sure you keep plenty of pressure on the syringe so as you force the grease into the pedal, not spewing out the side of the end of the syringe.

Non Pro Cycling Greasegun

Once the grease is flowing, you keep an eye on the spindle on the opposite side of the pedal to where you are injecting the grease.

Before you start, it will look like this.

Before Greasing

After a little while, you will see black dirty grease coming out of the pedal and onto the spindle. Keep injecting until you see clean grease coming out.

Dirty grease.

Once you have some clean grease coming out, ease the pressure off on the syringe or gun and remove it from the pedal injection port. Wipe the excess grease off there, if there is any, and replace the phillips head screw. Then just tidy up the dirty grease from the spindle and you are done. It really is quite simple, and it took me all of 5 minutes once I had the syringe loaded up with grease.